Biography:Abraham Klein
| Abraham Klein | |
|---|---|
| |
| Abraham Klein | |
| Born | 10 January 1927 Brooklyn, New York, United States |
| Died | 20 January 2003
|
| Known for | Kerman-Klein formalism; nuclear many-body theory; work on spontaneous symmetry breaking |
Abraham Klein (10 January 1927 - 20 January 2003) was an American theoretical physicist known for work in nuclear theory, quantum field theory, and the many-body problem.[1][2] He spent most of his career at the University of Pennsylvania, where he became professor of physics in 1958 and emeritus professor in 1994.[2]
Education and career
Klein was born in Brooklyn, New York. He received a B.A. in physics from Brooklyn College in 1947, then earned an M.A. in physics in 1948 and a Ph.D. in 1950 from Harvard University.[1][2] His doctoral adviser was Julian Schwinger, and his dissertation dealt with relativistic meson-field theory and nucleon interactions.[3]
After completing his doctorate, Klein remained at Harvard as an instructor and then as a junior fellow of the Society of Fellows.[1] In 1955 he joined the University of Pennsylvania as an associate professor of physics. He was promoted to professor in 1958 and remained at Penn until his retirement in 1994.[2]
Research
Klein's early research grew out of quantum field theory and nuclear-force problems influenced by Schwinger's methods.[1] At Penn he developed a long-term program in nuclear many-body theory, collective motion, and symmetry restoration. His work with Arthur K. Kerman led to what Physics Today called the Kerman-Klein formalism, a method for restoring broken symmetries in mean-field descriptions of finite many-particle systems.[1][4]
Klein also worked on boson mappings of Lie algebras, interacting-boson descriptions of nuclei, and theories of large-amplitude collective motion.[1] In the 1970s and 1980s he continued to connect nuclear collective models with broader many-body and field-theoretic methods.[5]
In 1964 Klein and his student Benjamin W. Lee published a Physical Review Letters paper on whether spontaneous symmetry breaking necessarily implies zero-mass particles.[6] The paper became part of the early literature around spontaneous symmetry breaking and the development of the Higgs mechanism. Lee, later a major particle theorist, completed his Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania under Klein's direction.[7]
Honors
Klein's honors included an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Senior Scientist Award, an honorary doctorate from Goethe University Frankfurt, and fellowship in the American Physical Society.[2] A 1991 symposium at Drexel University marked his 65th birthday and was later published as Symposium on Contemporary Physics: Celebrating the 65th Birthday of Professor Abraham Klein.[8]
Selected publications
- "Generalized Hartree-Fock Approximation for the Calculation of Collective States of a Finite Many-Particle System", with Arthur K. Kerman, Physical Review 132 (1963).[4]
- "Does Spontaneous Breakdown of Symmetry Imply Zero-Mass Particles?", with Benjamin W. Lee, Physical Review Letters 12 (1964).[6]
- Symposium on Contemporary Physics: Celebrating the 65th Birthday of Professor Abraham Klein, edited by Michel Vallieres and Da Hsuan Feng (1993).[8]
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 Dang, Giu Do (2003-10-01). "Abraham Klein". Physics Today 56 (10): 80-81. doi:10.1063/1.1629015. https://physicstoday.aip.org/obituaries/abraham-klein. Retrieved 2026-05-24.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 "Dr. Abraham Klein, Physicist". 2003-01-28. https://almanac.upenn.edu/archive/v49/n19/deaths.html.
- ↑ "Abraham Klein". https://www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=253376.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Kerman, Arthur K.; Klein, Abraham (1963). "Generalized Hartree-Fock Approximation for the Calculation of Collective States of a Finite Many-Particle System". Physical Review 132 (3): 1326-1342. doi:10.1103/PhysRev.132.1326.
- ↑ "Abraham Klein (physicist)". Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Klein_(physicist).
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 Klein, A.; Lee, B. W. (1964). "Does Spontaneous Breakdown of Symmetry Imply Zero-Mass Particles?". Physical Review Letters 12 (10): 266-268. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.12.266.
- ↑ "About Benjamin W. Lee". Fermilab. https://www.fnal.gov/pub/forphysicists/fellowships/ben_lee/about.html.
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 Vallieres, Michel; Feng, Da Hsuan, eds (1993). Symposium on Contemporary Physics: Celebrating the 65th Birthday of Professor Abraham Klein. World Scientific. ISBN 978-981-02-1503-3.
External links
- Abraham Klein on Wikipedia
- Abraham Klein obituary at Physics Today
- Dr. Abraham Klein, Physicist at the University of Pennsylvania Almanac